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Maybe you have never stopped to think that animals can also be right-handed or left-handed. Maybe it’s a banal issue, maybe we’re too busy looking at our navel, maybe we have much more important things to do. But the truth is that: animals are right-handed or left-handed. The most curious thing of this circumstance, however, are its statistics, very different from the human ones.
For example, in humans the percentages are overwhelming in favor of the right side: 90% of people are right-handed. This is mainly due to genetic factors, although in some moments of history this prevalence has been forced due to questions of superstition (we only have to look at expressions like “I got up on the wrong (left) side of the bed”, or in the etymology of “sinister”, a word that also means something that is on the left side, as everyone knows alludes to concepts such as evil, malicious, unhappy, etc.)
The fact is that most parrots and cockatoos are left-handed. Only 3% of these animals use the right leg to carry food to the beak. The whales, however, are skilled in almost 100% of the cases: this can be verified when they flip-flop or in the movements they make when capturing their prey.
The proportion of this characteristic in dogs (as, for example, chimpanzees), is 50/50; that is, half are left-handed and the other half are right-handed.
Knowing if your dog is left-handed or right-handed is relatively simple. A trick is to give him a game full of food and see which leg he decides to use first to catch it. To obtain a reliable statistic you must repeat this activity 100 times as a minimum.
The observation will help you to base your diagnosis: what leg he uses more to look for something under the sofa, what little leg he gives you when you ask for it, which of them brings you the toy when you play, etc. Here you must also attach importance to repetition.
In HANNIKO we’re thinking that you could throw a penalty, to see which leg kicks the best…
Because the important thing is to know that, as happens with human beings, you are not better or worse for being left-handed or right-handed. It is simply one of those arbitrariness of evolution that stimulates our curiosity.
